Second Amendment

On Tuesday this week we all should have been jubilantly celebrating the 224th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the original 10 amendments to the United States’ federal constitution. Remarkably, it slipped by relatively unremarked. Yet our Bill of Rights may actually be the most significant of our republic’s founding documents.

The generations who founded America and our republic saw that ensuring the individual rights of free people was necessary to limiting government power and to their own pursuit of happiness. This came to be expressed in our Bill of Rights with its ultimate guarantor, the Second Amendment.

Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.— Donald Trump, Aug. 9, 2016

On Independence Day weekend California Governor Jerry Brown, with the stroke of a pen, created several million brand new criminals in the once-Golden State. Before jumping on a plane for a European vacation, he signed six of the eleven gun control bills sent to him by the one-party lynch mob that California’s legislature has become. All six laws will go into effect next year. They create new crimes that will be committed simply because of Governor Brown’s signature, not by any actual misdeeds of hapless Californians against person or property.

Have you had the experience of going to your doctor for a particular problem, let’s say headaches, and been surprised by the doctor asking you about a completely unrelated subject — whether you have a gun in your home?

We can all feel it. With violent crime dominating the headlines, the pressure to blame gun owners is mounting. Everywhere we look, we see the familiar gun grabbers calling for “universal” background checks, a ban on semi-automatic rifles, and that old saw, restoring funding to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for “firearm research.”

In his reply to my article, Dr. Miguel Faria, a very fine neurosurgeon and writer, states that it is unethical for physicians “to intrusively ask patients about the presence of guns in the home” and that by so doing, physicians become “snitches” against their own patients.

I agree that if the purpose of asking about guns is solely to report the possession of guns, and that if the physician asks “intrusively” and reports without the patient’s permission and in the absence of an imminent threat, it would be wrong.

David Oedel is incorrect in his assertion (“A right to armed revolt?”, 1/27) that Justice Scalia’s opinion in D.C. vs. Heller limits the right to keep and bear arms to weapons “in common use at the time” the Second Amendment was ratified. In fact, in his decision Justice Scalia characterizes such arguments as “bordering on the frivolous.”

Pediatrician asks 13-year-old girl whether her parents smoke or own a gun, how much alcohol they drink, whether they use drugs, and how her parents “get along.” Neither parent was present during the questioning, as would be required if the girl were accused of a crime. − News Item

Abstract — Gun violence and, most recently, senseless shooting rampages continue to be sensitive and emotional points of debate in the American media and the political establishment. The United Nations is already set to commence discussing and approving its Small Arms Treaty in March 2013. And following the Newtown, Connecticut tragedy in the United States this past December, American legislators are working frantically to pass more stringent gun control laws in the U.S. Congress.

The latest shooting rampage of 26 people, including six adults and 20 children in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012, is a senseless tragedy, and words cannot convey the horror and the magnitude of the loss of innocent life. The second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history was carried out by 20-year-old Adam Lanza (photo, left), a loner with a personality disorder — and in critical need of psychiatric evaluation and treatment.

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then.

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States.

— Noah Webster, An Examination of the Leading Principlesof the Federal Constitution, 1787

In the wake of President Barack Obama's re-election on November 6, 2012, and the virtual demoralization of Republicans, it is important to recognize that the political mastery of the left does not last forever. Moreover, three new conservative, pro-Second Amendment senators and several freshmen representatives were elected. A solid Republican majority was preserved in the House of Representatives. So, the election did not mean complete defeat for the GOP.

Miguel Faria, MD, a neurosurgeon and Emeritus Editor of The Journal of The American Physicians and Surgeons, formerly the Medical Sentinel, and Associate Editor-in-Chief of Surgical Neurology International and its World Affairs Section, has written a two‑part Editorial on “America, Guns, and Freedom.” These essays address a very important topic to physicians everywhere, relate to the often, distorted media reports advocating the disarming of citizens, and the costs of health care of guns in the hands of citizens.

The role of gun violence and street crime in the United States and the world is currently a subject of great debate among national and international organizations, including the United Nations. Because the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the individual right of American citizens to own private firearms, availability of firearms is greater in the U.S. than the rest of the world, except perhaps in Israel and Switzerland.

The role of gun violence and street crime in the United States and the world is currently a subject of great debate among national and international organizations, including the United Nations. Because the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the individual right of American citizens to own private firearms, availability of firearms is greater in the U.S. than the rest of the world, except perhaps in Israel and Switzerland.

Nominated by President Barack Obama (after Justice John Paul Stevens retired in April 2010), Elena Kagan has been the first U.S. Supreme Court Justice appointed without prior experience as a judge since the appointment of William Rehnquist in 1972. It now seems to me that her nomination by President Obama was payback for the fact that Kagan had legally represented him in stalling all court challenges attempting to ascertain Obama's citizenship.(1) But what about her standing on the Second Amendment?

Abstract — The AMA Council on Scientific Affairs did not conduct a rigorous scientific evaluation before supporting a ban on assault weapons. The Council appears to have unquestioningly accepted common misperceptions and even partisan misrepresentations regarding the nature and uses of assault weapons. This article examines the pivotal issues and proposes a rational approach to gun control and more effectual measures to reduce violence in our society.

"Violence in America — Effective Soutions" by Suter EA, Waters WC, Murray GB, et al. was originally published in the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia, Volume 85, June 1995, pp 253-263 while Dr. Miguel A. Faria served as Editor-in-Chief of that medical journal. The following link is provided for readers who wish to read the entire article:http://rkba.org/research/suter/violence.html.

Abstract — Errors of fact, design, and interpretation abound in the medical literature on guns and violence. The peer review process has failed to prevent publication of the errors of politicized, results-oriented research. Most of the data on guns and violence are available in the criminological, legal, and social sciences literature, yet escapes acknowledgment or analysis of the medical literature.

Dear Physicians, For years, organized medicine has been misusing its authority to turn the public against firearms owners. Prestigious medical journals have abandoned their usually strict peer review standards to publish junk science articles written by anti-gun activists with medical degrees. Their purpose? As one pediatrician put it, to convince Americans that 64 guns are a virus to be eradicated."

In public pronouncements, Attorney General Janet Reno's Justice Department and other administration officials have implied erroneously that the Second Amendment refers to a collective right rather than an individual right.

In view of the devastating aerial terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by Islamic fanatic followers of Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001, we have put together a special issue of the Medical Sentinel on the threat of bioterrorism in our own backyard. I am referring to communist Cuba under tyrant Fidel Castro only ninety miles from our shores.

"There is a worrying trend in academic medicine which equatesstatistics with science, and sophistication in quantitative procedurewith research excellence. The corollary of this trend is a tendency to look for answers to medical problems from people with expertise in mathematical manipulation and information technology, rather than from people with an understanding of disease and its causes.

It is becoming abundantly clear that the mainstream liberal media and the entrenched political medical establishment support draconian gun control measures that would ultimately lead to the confiscation and banning of firearms.

A prominent member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons has refuted key details of a study published recently by the Violence Policy Center, in which researchers concluded that women were not safer if they used a handgun for self-defense.

Diary of Dreams performs at the 2016 M’era Luna festival in Hildesheim, Germany. M’era Luna, “one of the biggest dark music events in Germany,” is held each year on the second weekend in August. Close to 25,000 people attend the festival annually to hear gothic, metal and industrial music performed on two large festival-style stages.